Understanding the Social Media Landscape
Understanding the Social Media Landscape
Navigating the social media landscape can be difficult given the overwhelming avenue of possibilities. Furthermore, with so many changes taking place regularly, it can be a daunting task to stay on top of the fast-changing social media curve. To make it slightly easier, this info graphic offers a social media map to visualize how changes on different fronts have come together to produce the online world that we know today, a world that presents a field of opportunities for business.
In the center we find Platformia, the core of the social media planet, and composed of all those online tools that provide platforms for interaction and content sharing between Internet users. Huge social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr shape the lands of Platformia, along with other, smaller tools like Live Journal, Branchout or Color, each one with its own role to play in forming the way communication is shaped today. WordPress, for instance, is one of the most popular blogging platforms, while Skype if favored as the most convenient and cost-effective voice over Internet services.
Navigating to the northeast, you will find the Analytics Archipelago. Analytics represent a powerful tool for all the companies operating in the online environment, as it gives them a valuable insight into customer behavior. Trackur or Sentiment Metrics, to mention just a few, help track consumer trends and characteristics, showing the impact businesses have on their consumers. In order words, they serve to collect relevant business intelligence to help businesses understand market trends in more depth.
On the Isle of Enterprise 2.0, you will find iconic companies like Oracle, IBM, Cisco and Microsoft, among many others, that have all contributed to the development of business enterprise through innovative hardware and software, cutting-edge products, business solutions and business consulting.
Another important continent of the social media world is shared between the Democratic Republic of Commerce and the People’s Republic of Engagement. These two sides of the same land mass provide in unison a plethora of different tools to help businesses engage with customers in innovative ways, such as CRM solutions, marketing endeavor and new apps, among many other novelties. Players in this continent include Salesforce.com, virtue, Buddy Media and Zeebox, among many others.
Other islands, although smaller, are also represented on the info graphic. Included in this lot is the Isle of Social Gaming that contains some very popular websites, like Zynga or Rovio, where Internet users from all over the world can gather to interact together and share an entertaining moment together. For companies, gamification is one of the newest trends in marketing as it offers companies the chance to create online spaces that can help increase brand awareness and recognition. Also among those smaller islands is So-Lo-Mo, definitely an expanding island at the moment that regroups all those location services, like Foursquare or Facebook Places, that help identifying consumers based on their location, contacting them via mobile devices or social media networks, and thus reaching particular segments of the population.
